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The NYPD Needs Legitimacy Concert @ MSG

We are working on Kanye West headlining at Madison Square Garden at The NYPD Needs Legitimacy Concert. This concert will be featured in a documentary addressing inequity called I Could Be….

About 10 years ago we produced a local television show called Live From VAand we interviewed Kanye West three times. We have some great stories behind those interviews. Links to two of those interviews are below.

This process [standard market research] is fundamentally flawed. It is completely screwed. We totally overrate the significance of what we find out when we go through this kind of formal process and the consequence of that overreliance on this system is that we are cheating ourselves of all kinds of wonderful experiences that we would otherwise have [such as Kenna].

[D]eep learning… seeks to remake computing by more closely mimicking the way the human brain processes information, giving machines more power to “learn” as time goes on.

The technology has so much promise, it has sparked a kind of arms race among the giants of tech. Google and Facebook recently hired the two academics who originally laid out the concepts behind deep learning, and earlier this month, Chinese search giant Baidu followed suit when it snapped up another academic at the heart of the movement. But Adam Gibson, an independent software engineer based in San Francisco, doesn’t want this new technology locked inside the biggest names on the net. He believes deep learning techniques should be available to any website, company, or developer interested in using them. And that’s why he’s launching a new startup called Skymind.

It’s not a war on drugs. Don’t ever think it’s a war on drugs. It’s a war on the Blacks. It started as a war on the Blacks, it’s now spread to Hispanics and poor Whites. But initially it was a war on Blacks. And it was designed basically to take that energy that was coming out of the Civil Rights Movement and destroy it.

~ Ed Burns

Co-creator of “The Wire”

Bank of America, Western Union, and JP Morgan, are among the institutions allegedly involved in the drug trade. Meanwhile, HSBC has admitted its laundering role, and evaded criminal prosecution by paying a fine of almost $2 billion. The lack of imprisonment of any bankers involved is indicative of the hypocritical nature of the drug war; an individual selling a few grams of drugs can face decades in prison, while a group of people that tacitly allow — and profit from — the trade of tons, escape incarceration.

Corporate crime inflicts far more damage on society than all street crime combined.Whether in bodies or injuries or dollars lost, corporate crime and violence wins by a landslide.

The FBI estimates, for example, that burglary and robbery – street crimes – costs the nation $3.8 billion a year.

The losses from a handful of major corporate frauds – Tyco, Adelphia, Worldcom, Enron – swamp the losses from all street robberies and burglaries combined.